Few things are as obvious as rank hypocrisy — especially from elites. Whether it’s the “eight or ten fat gentlemen” of the workhouse board who berate Oliver Twist for asking for more gruel, or the legion of sleek celebrities and billionaires who lecture us about the evils of CO2 from the luxury of their private jets, “Do as I say, not as I do” is as glaring as it is galling.
The hypocrisy of the media-political elite’s pearl-clutching over the Freedom protests is so obvious that even other lefties can see it. Over at the Daily Blog, activist Suzie Dawson recounts the long history of “violent imagery” at left-wing protests in New Zealand: guillotines outside Auckland town hall, complete with the beheading of effigies of everyone from John Key to Paula Bennett — all in front of children. Then there was the violence and vandalism of the Springbok protests in 1981 — protests Trevor Mallard still brags about.
More recently in Australia, former PM Tony Abbott has been beheaded in effigy and a John Howard pinata smashed by an ABC editor, and feminist protesters have dangled mock severed penises from nooses outside Parliament. Unionists have smashed their way into Parliament with iron bars and climate activists have invaded Parliament and defaced its facade.
All just the democratic right to protest, the media-political elite said.
Then the anti-mandate Freedom protesters came and peacefully camped in front of Parliament — and the elite went insane.
A narrative has taken hold in the minds of progressives ever fearful of the rise of populist movements. “The pandemic is essentially serving as a gateway drug for violent extremists to dabble in new ideologies and conspiracies,” wrote Colin C. Clarke in the LA Times last month. “The anti-vaxxer movement could end up serving as a conveyor belt that delivers new members to other extremist groups.”
The conflation of mere protests with terrorism has consequences. It dulls our appreciation of the threat from genuine terrorism and opens the way to apply anti-terrorist laws against people simply exercising free speech.
The determination of the Covidians to criminalise free speech is shown by their shrieking to jail people for covid “misinformation”. In some of the more chilling images of pandemic authoritarianism, police in Victoria arrested a pregnant woman at home in pyjamas, and stormed another man’s house in Melbourne, because of social media posts discussing protests.
Politicians and activists demand that “misinformation” be prescribed as “terrorism”.
The woke defenders of coercive public health measures have been muttering for months about nefarious bands of extremist infiltrators trying to hijack the cause of health freedom. When the freedom convoy set up camp in Canberra earlier this month, The Canberra Times showed its colours by asserting that it consisted of “loosely affiliated groups, such as sovereign citizens, anti-vaccine conspiracists and evangelicals”. Yet little evidence emerged to support this sweeping claim, which, like so much that appears in print these days, appears to have been written from the office.
There are still, remarkably, a few mainstream journalists who remember how to to do actual journalism: in other words, get out and actually report from the ground, rather than regurgitating the opinions of their Twitter feeds. One such is Nine’s Chris Uhlmann.
Uhlmann reported the presence of a handful of mask-wearing Proud Boys and recalled a previous March4Justice protest at which a woman in a black balaclava yelled that he was “a c..t”. Most of the crowd, however, “looked like they had just wandered out of Bunnings”, he wrote. “If anything defined them, it was that most didn’t appear to work in jobs they could easily do from home. Once we would have called them working class.”
Any radical tendencies lurking in what Uhlmann described as the biggest crowd he could remember in 30 years of covering protests in the capital would surely have been splashed across The Canberra Times. Yet the worst the paper found it could blame on the crowd was the cancellation of a charity book fair and a growers’ market. The police charge sheet was thin, with a single charge of firearm possession, which is contested, and a handful of minor offences.
The Australian
What the elite over-reaction shows is just how afraid they really are. The Freedom protesters have shaken the media-political elite all the way to the Ninth Floor. It’s as if the peasants have marched on Versaille, pitchforks waving. That the “mob” is really a peaceful assemblage with a visibly diverse face only makes it worse — for them. So naturally, they lie through their teeth.
There are two options for the Freedom protesters in Wellington.
First, they could give up being polite, because the government and their bought-and-paid-for media are just going to lie about them anyway. But, aside from its inherent wrongness, violence never wins hearts and minds. Support for BLM in the US plummeted in the wake of the months of riots, no matter how much the media tried to excuse them away.
The second option is the way of King and Gandhi. Be resolutely, scrupulously well-behaved. Be welcoming, but judicious: vigilant for the presence of extremist hangers-on, even (and it’s not at all beyond the bounds of possibility) provocateurs.
The media-political nexus will still lie about you, of course. But the greater the gap between official hysteria and reality the more New Zealanders will come to see the truth and the deeper will be the hole that the elite will dig for themselves.